This is going to be a meandering series of ruminations and speculations on modes of human organization. I'm attracting a trickle of new subscribers from talking about covid and stuff, and this is going a bit sideways from that—longtime readers will be aware my writing is scattered all over the place--but it's fundamentally relevant to public health policy because it will ultimately end up at why it's so hard to change things.
This post is mostly stage-setting. Next week I’ll justify the claim that organizational modes are technologies, then describe what I think the major organizational modes so far have been, talk about each of them, and finally take a deeper dive into modernity and where we might go next.
I have friends who talk about "late capitalism" as if they believed in some kind of stages of social development. They await capitalism's inevitable collapse under its contradictions, and its replacement by something better.
I don't.
It's not that I don't think capitalism has its issues. Look around you. It's that I think that solving them is essentially a technological problem, and technological problems are hard. I don't mean "technological" in the usual sense of gadgets, but of what I'm calling "organizational modes", about which more below.
My approach to the question of "Why is this organization structured the way it is?" is mostly ahistorical, because although scientists are taught that six months in the lab can often allow you to avoid an afternoon in the library, we're also taught to that thinking things through ourselves, starting as close to the ground as possible, is a good way to find new things rather than to repeat the errors of the past. And besides, I have the ultimate luxury of thinking about stuff unbounded by the needs of career, and more-or-less unfettered by law or custom, so why wouldn’t I use that opportunity to do something as original as possible?
That said, I'm not entirely unfamiliar with past thinking on human organization--including the bits that go by the name of "theories of society"--and I think some familiarity is necessary because we tend to make the same mistakes as other people, and lack of familiarity with the past is an invitation to recapitulate the errors of the past. The reason why errors in science last so long is because the other person is just as smart as you. If they make a mistake, and you replicate their work independently, you'll probably make the same mistakes as they did.
So on the one hand, I'm taking an ahistorical approach because I don't want to build on the errors of the past, and on the other hand I'm trying to keep history in mind because I don't want to independently reinvent the errors of the past. It’s a balancing act.
In this series--which is likely to go on for a month or so--I'm going to propose answers a number of questions:
1) What is "the Modern world"? What distinguishes the Modern condition from everything else?
2) Why does it suck? This is where I'll get into the specifics of public health failures, corporate excess, partisan shenanigans, and the like.
3) Why do the usual attempts to replace it with something better always fail?
4) How could the Modern world most plausibly be improved? That is, short of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order, which has been tried frequently and always fails, despite a whole phalax of pundits make their living selling the lie that This Time It’s Different—what can we do to make things better?
5) What could plausibly replace the Modern world? While I don’t think self-consciously revolutionary change is useful or interesting, I do think we can take the initiative in meaningful ways that will help push the world toward some kind of more humane way of organizing itself.
I'll give the answers here in short form, which I don't expect anyone to understand. The point of the series is to make the following claims coherent, and ideally plausible:
1) The Modern world is one where the default organizational mode is the amoral hierarchy.
2) It sucks because amoral hierarchies scale, which makes people's position within them meaningless, and makes the hierarchies themselves dangerous.
3) Attempts to replace Modernity always fail because they either replicated it (state socialism, in the worst case) or try to implement modes of organization that are known to be unstable against it (mostly communalism on the left, and moral hierarchies on the right).
4) It could be improved by giving people the opportunity to create local stability and meaning via social democracy, which separates their existence from amoral hierarchies by putting a floor under the bottom level. Social democracy is a form of capitalism in which anyone can get (fairly) rich, but no one can be poor.
5) Constraints on plausible replacements are that they have to be able to organize people at least as efficiently and effectively as amoral hierarchies, have a natural scale or scales, and are almost certainly semi-hierarchical. The governance of open source projects is one place to look for models, but as I will explain, it is unrealistic to expect that our early imaginings will look anything like what the future actually holds.
That's a lot of word-salad without a lot of background, and to develop that background we have to start way back, temporally and conceptually.
Conceptually, we have to think about the ways we organize ourselves as technologies. This is not the only way of thinking about them, and may not even be a very accurate way of doing so. We'll see. I am a physicist, and physicists often build models that are wildly unphysical, but still very useful. There is something called the "liquid drop" model of the atomic nucleus that treats nuclear matter as a fluid, even though it violates most of the assumptions of the continuum hypothesis that fluid mechanics depends on. Regardless, it is a useful way of looking at the world. I claim no more for what I'm doing here: I am proposing that looking at the way humans organize themselves as technologies is a useful way of looking at things, which can generate actionable answers to a variety of interesting questions.
Eventually I may engage in some dynamical modeling of these ideas, as that's kind of the unifying principle, if there is one, of a lot of what I'm writing here: how we can use dynamics and dynamical modelling to understand the world, which non-scientists tend to think about statically. To take an extreme case, economists who claim that markets are always in equilibrium are, like Medieval masons, deliberately restricting themselves to statics. Unlike Medieval masons, they should know better.
No Progress, No Evolution
Social theorists have long had a tendency to talk about "progress" as if history was goal-directed or working toward some "end". Hegelians like Marx and Engels are the worst for this, and have had the most influence, which endures today in the form of the myth of "late capitalism" which has said the global capitalist order is going to vanish in a puff of synthesis Real Soon Now for the past nine decades. The term first became popular in the wake of the Crash of '29, which was supposed to usher in a century of socialist progress, not a century of more capitalism.
The notion that each historical epoch contains in its own structure a set of contradictions--be they spiritual or material--that constitute the seeds of its inevitable successor is evidence-free nonsense of a kind that only opium-smoking German rationalists could come up with.
Nor is Darwinian evolution a particularly good model for historical processes. Differential reproduction with modification is not how technologies develop, so it's not how organizational modes develop.
Technological "progress" is a mess, especially when looked at over historical time. Things are learned and forgotten, tried, failed, retried, set in competition with other ways of doing the same thing, and so on. Kind of like actual history, and quite unlike evolution by variation and natural selection.
The Problem and Who Has It
Technologies are invented to solve problems, and if I'm going to view modes of organization as technologies it's important to identify the problem or problems they are intended to solve.
"Intended" is an important word here, because it rules out "society" or "company" or even "team" as the entity in question.
A group of people doesn't have motives, plans, or intents because all of those are things that brains do, and groups of people don't have brains. I say "brain" rather than "mind" because I'm being concrete and literal: motives, plans, and intents are properties of matter organized into the structures we call brains. Where is the matter that is organized into a literal, physical, identifiable, non-metaphorical brain that guides a group? I don’t see it.
People intend things, so if organizational modes are a technology they must be solving problems that at least some people have.
Not everyone has to have a problem for a technology to be invented to solve it.
For example, I don't have any problems that can be solved by guns, so I don't own any guns. A lot of people don't have problems that can be solved by boats, so they never set foot on a boat. I on the other hand live on an island, which is offshore another island: very few of my problems don't involve boats in a pretty direct way.
I mention this because when I get to the problems I think organizational modes solve I anticipate an objection of the form, "But not everyone has those problems!
So?
All that's required for a technology to be invented is:
a) it must be possible
b) enough people must have a problem that it solves, which may be just one.
Others can sit around and talk about how terrible it is that people want the things that that technology provides, and point to examples of people who don't want those things, and say how wonderful it would be if everyone was like that, but those people are irrelevant: what matters to the introduction and persistence of a technology is that there are enough people who want it to make it worth someone’s while to create it.
To put it another way: even though I don't have any problems that can be solved with guns, it's apparent that a lot of people do even though I think most of them are kind of stupid for thinking those problems are important, or can be solved by guns. It's worth understanding those people, particularly if we want to invent new solutions to their problems that don't involve guns.
The problem that modes of organization solve is getting people to work together in a coordinated manner.
That's it. "Getting people to do stuff together toward a goal in a way that they don't step on each other's toes too often" is the whole story.
The people who have this problem are sometimes called "leaders", and there may be one or many in any group.
This is a hard problem, and one gets the sense that few if any social theorists have ever organized anything as complex as a bake sale.
Me, I've been a manager, an entrepreneur, an executive, and a member of the odd volunteer organization. Despite being basically misanthropic, probably a good half of my career has been spent trying to get people to do things in a coordinated manner. Sometimes I've succeeded. Other times I've completely failed. This experience definitely informs my view of how hard this problem is, and gives me great sympathy and admiration for people who live in societies that lack some of the fancier modern tools for getting people to behave as you want, like stock options.
But a mode is not a simple tool. It's a whole family of approaches to the problem.
Modes and Methods
I'm using the term "modes of organization" because we use "mode" to describe broad categories: air, land, and sea are modes of transportation. Vocalizations, gestures, and radio-waves are all modes of communication.
Within each mode enormous variation is possible: someone speaking a Coast Salish language is using the same mode as someone speaking a Romance language.
Each mode is defined by its constraints, and understanding those constraints is vital to understanding what a particular mode can or can't do. One of my contentions, for example, is that Soviet-style socialism is in the same organizational mode as capitalist economies, which is why "socialist" economies end up looking like "state capitalism" to people who are only thinking in terms of Marxist "stage of production" categories rather than organizational technologies. To me, this is an interesting result, and was one of the early realizations that motivated to pursue this line of thinking in more depth.
This is not to say that socialism and capitalism aren't different: they are, just as Island Hul'q'umin'um' is different from French. But they have similar limitations in terms of encoding density, the distance over which they can be heard, and so on. The constraints are a product of the mode, not the instance, and changing instances won't relax them, even though it might look that way to someone who only speaks one language, and imagines that if they just learned another they'd be able to communicate over much longer distances, or whatever. Whereas in reality they’d have to learn semphore, or something like that: a totally different mode, maybe hard to imagine from the perspective of someone who is only familiar with vocalization as a mode of communication.
What I’m going to argue over the next few weeks is that:
a) Organizational modes are technologies.
b) There have only been three of them so far.
c) This is a useful and interesting way of looking at things.
The third point is about method: like any way of drawing edges to divide up the world, this analysis into organizational modes is driven by the needs of the knowing subject (me) and constrained by the nature of the world (everything else). The edges I'm drawing between different modes of organization are as real as the edges we draw between the continents and the oceans, but someone with a different set of goals than mine might draw the edges of continents not at the beach but where the continental shelf drops into the oceanic abyss, which can be hundreds of kilometres offshore.
It is undoubtedly the case that there are other ways of dividing up organizations than this idea of high-level organizational modes. I just don't care, at least for the purposes of this series. It's not a critique of this approach to say, "Yeah but there are other ways of doing it."
So while I'm going to use standard English for the most part, it's worth pointing out that when I say "organizational modes are technologies" what I mean is "organizational modes can be usefully understood as technologies". I'm not asserting what is "really real" in the way that some philosophers do (often with a certain percussive emphasis).
I'm saying, "We can look at the world like this, and learn something from it." In this sense, what I'm doing here is maybe a bit like art: looking at the world in a new way, and trying to get others to see it that way as well. This does not mean there are no bad takes: the world is full of bad art. But we make a mistake if we think there is only one way to pet a cat.
This has already gone over-long, so I'll leave to next week the question of "What is a technology and how can we understand organizational modes as technologies?" It’ll mostly be about genre improv, and screenwriting.